James Leslie Mitchell (1901–1935), better known as Lewis Grassic Gibbon, was born #OTD, 13 Feb. Author of SUNSET SONG – & many other titles from historical fiction to science fiction – he is one of the most important Scottish writers of the 20th century
A 🎂 🧵…
1/9
#Scottish #literature #modernism #20thcentury #HistoricalFiction #ScienceFiction #LewisGrassicGibbon
Lewis Grassic Gibbon: Uncovering the morning star
“The ambiguity of authority & reliability in narration, in Scots or English, is central to Hogg, Galt, Stevenson, many others, but in Gibbon’s trilogy it is utterly deconstructed”
—Alan Riach: the influence of Gibbon on contemporary Scottish literature
2/9
https://www.thenational.scot/news/15550316.lewis-grassic-gibbon-uncovering-the-morning-star/
#Scottish #literature #modernism #20thcentury #LewisGrassicGibbon #SunsetSong #Scots #Scotslanguage
“Not only did he invent a sentence structure that works like breath through the body of the reader, and a kind of Scottish English that’s simultaneously rich and spare, but [A SCOTS QUAIR is] a formally stunning and cunning work of art”
—Ali Smith in 2019, on James Leslie Mitchell / Lewis Grassic Gibbon
3/9
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/29/ali-smith-books-that-made-me
#Scottish #literature #modernism #20thcentury #LewisGrassicGibbon #SunsetSong #Scots #Scotslanguage
SUNSET SONG: a Scottish Gift to German Readers
Regina Erich compares the original German translation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A SCOTS QUAIR trilogy published in the GDR between 1970 & 1986, with its more recent republication in a unified Germany
4/9
https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2019/12/sunset-song-a-scottish-gift-to-german-readers/
#Scottish #literature #20thcentury #modernism #LewisGrassicGibbon #SunsetSong #translation #German #EastGermany #GDR
Scottish literature enjoys a wide international readership. Many Scottish authors, whether creators of classic novels or contemporary writers, have been translated into foreign languages. Germany is no exception to this. Walk into any German bookshop and you will find at least one book written by a Scot. Yet one great Scottish writer seemed to have […]
“When Kleon heard the news from Capua he rose early one morning, being a literatus & unchained, crept to the room of his Master, stabbed him in the throat, mutilated that Master’s body even as his own had been mutilated; and so fled from Rome with a stained dagger in his sleeve and a copy of THE REPUBLIC of Plato hidden in his breast.”
Ian Campbell discusses the vivid realisation of a slave revolt in Mitchell’s SPARTACUS (1933)
5/9
Why Everybody Needs Smeddum
“The heroine, Meg Menzies, is Gibbon’s answer to Austen’s Mrs Bennet. In fact, she works as a kind of anti-Mrs Bennet.”
—Graeme Trousdale on Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s classic short story “Smeddum”
6/9
https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2007/05/why-everybody-needs-smeddum/
#Scottish #literature #modernism #20thcentury #LewisGrassicGibbon #SunsetSong #Scots #Scotslanguage #shortstory #shortfiction
Lewis Grassic Gibbon‘s Smeddum, the tale of the Menzies family in rural north-east Scotland, is a beautifully crafted, and really satisfying short story. The word ‘smeddum’ means ‘spirit’, ‘determination’, ‘true grit’. That grit is now metaphorical, but the earliest recorded use of the word shows that smeodoma in Old English was used as a gloss for the Latin […]
SUNSET SONG
Currently on the iPlayer: the digitally restored 1971 BBC adaptation of the first part of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s SCOTS QUAIR trilogy about a young girl’s intellectual & sexual development in rural north-east Scotland just before WW1
7/9
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m001bm9l/sunset-song
#Scottish #literature #modernism #20thcentury #LewisGrassicGibbon #SunsetSong #Scots #Scotslanguage #adaptation #TV
Prof Scott Lyall discusses SUNSET SONG – a talk given at our Schools Conference in 2015
8/9
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84NMdO47oy4&list=PLEP9HxY4X7WYcu-9sTwjGIqkJDYOImwgK
#Scottish #literature #modernism #20thcentury #LewisGrassicGibbon #SunsetSong #Scots #Scotslanguage
The International Companion to Lewis Grassic Gibbon
ed. Scott Lyall
The best contemporary guide to Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s/James Leslie Mitchell’s literature, politics, life, & work – available in print or online via Project MUSE
9/9
https://asls.org.uk/publications/books/companions/ic1/
#Scottish #literature #modernism #20thcentury #HistoricalFiction #ScienceFiction #LewisGrassicGibbon #SunsetSong #Scots #Scotslanguage
Assoc for Scottish Literature
